


weak and alluring, well we break our rules (get drunk in the dark)

by moonbeatblues



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: F/F, and that’s all folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 15:00:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16704727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: Purgatory winter is about as redundant as it gets— everything feels downright anemic half the year— but Purgatory summers, well. Therein lies the century’s oxymoron.Waverly Earp has been dating Champ for far too long, Nicole thinks, and takes a conciliatory pull of warm, shitty beer.





	weak and alluring, well we break our rules (get drunk in the dark)

**Author's Note:**

> title song is body to flame by lucy dacus
> 
> this has been sitting in my drafts awhile and i forgot i kinda actually liked it

 

Purgatory winter is about as redundant as it gets— everything feels downright anemic half the year— but Purgatory summers, well. Therein lies the century’s oxymoron.

 

It’s late August— the whole town smells like sun-baked asphalt, and nights always find the sky choking and full of the smoke from stupid Purgatory High bonfires.

 

Waverly Earp has been dating Champ for far too long, Nicole thinks, and takes a conciliatory pull of warm, shitty beer.

Better liquor would burn in the throat— not that Nicole’s familiar. She’s:

-straight-edge as they come

-had maybe half a sip of whiskey in her life

-a good kid, as Nedley’ll rumble low in his chest and muss her hair— but the alcohol is just a stagnant buzz in her stomach.

Not that it matters.

God knows it’s not why she’s here.

 

Waverly Earp— now there’s a name like embers on her tongue.

 

 

“Planning on standing watch here all night, Clifford?”

 

Wynonna Earp hits like smoke. Acrid, sour and inexplicably cool (to those with good taste, anyway); she grinds her boot down in the loose, red dirt to snuff out the remainder of her cigarette. Lets that gray streak of ash drift from between her teeth to mingle overhead.

 

This close to the fire, untended and sagging as it is, the sky is murky and the stars distant, myopic. Nicole blinks back, but blessedly, Wynonna gets rhetorical when she has something else in mind.

Namely, Nicole’s beer, which she snatches with a crooked grin— much as she tries, Wynonna Earp’s only expression has only ever been a variation on a snarl— before going to find Dolls.

And her sister— _her sister._

 

Waverly’s here with her waste-of-carbon boyfriend.

Drowning in his letterman and looking like she’s realized it, too— by some miracle, Nicole almost never sees them together.

She tries to make a habit of not seeing Champ at all, but, well. It’s a small town, douchebros have a penchant for getting booked on nights like these, and Nicole works for Nedley.

 

 

And god, Waverly treats dating him like it’s a chore, brusque as she is cleaning tables. Like someone has to do it.

Waverly is nothing if not neat, and Nicole thinks, listless and dizzy, that it makes the worst kind of sense that she saddles herself with a perpetual mess. Something to keep her busy.

Nicole wonders if Waverly feels like a shark, and then, less sadly and even more idly, she thinks that her letterman would fit Waverly much better. 

—

 

Waverly has her head tipped to one side as Nicole approaches. The light of the fire’s licking at the dark hollows of her cheekbones, and Nicole is suddenly a little envious of it.

Mercifully, or maybe unmercifully, no one else is here. These sorts of things don’t really get advertised, after all.

Well, more specifically, these sorts of things don’t really get advertised to Nicole; surprisingly, no one’s exactly letting her take notes on what days they’re planning on breaking the law. Not even Waverly, saccharine and open as she is around Nicole; the Earps and the police don’t exactly mix, and somewhere in that far-off house with its dim lights and probable crime scenes Waverly grew up with a mistrustful streak towards law enforcement to match her sister’s.

 

But Nicole isn’t a cop yet, and Waverly’s voice is breathy and sweet when she calls out.

“Hey, Haught.”

 

“Waves,” Nicole says, dropping comfortably to crouch in front of her. There are a few bottles standing precariously close to the fire, and she tries not to think about them popping like so many glass balloons.

 

“If you’re looking for Wynonna, she and Dolls went to the cabin with everyone else.”

There’s a distant hoot from up the hill, and Nicole imagines Wynonna’s won some drinking game or other.

_Coyote Ugly_ , she thinks.

 

“Nah,” Nicole drags the word out on a flat exhale. “I think this Earp will do just fine for company, for a little while.”

 

She watches one of the big base logs buckle and sink, split through with lines of pulsing red like veins, and follows the resulting upwards puff of gray, flaking ash. “What about you, though? Tired of how shit vodka tastes on someone else’s mouth?”

She’s trying for gentle, teasing, but Waverly isn’t having it.

 

She hiccups, and Nicole realizes she’s been crying.

“Shit, Waves, I didn’t— “

 

“It’s fine.”

Waverly sniffs, and shifts forward a little, pushing her thin, pretty fingers out of those puddling sleeves.

 

There’s a long pause. Nicole definitely isn’t thinking anymore on Waverly Earp and her thin, pretty fingers.

 

“You— “ and she’s leaning over, now, “—you ever feel like you’ve been wasting your time for longer than you can remember? Like it’s already too late to stop.”

 

“Um,” Nicole supplies, and then takes a moment.

 

“Yeah, I think so.”

 

Waverly’s watching her with her eyes dark and loose and wet, and Nicole reaches for her hand, a little brave and pushing down that prickling feeling that she’s being predatory, she’s treading in foreign waters, she’s—

 

“What am I supposed to do about it?” Waverly husks. Her hand shakes and Nicole presses their palms together a little more firmly.

 

God, like she knows.

 

“I don’t think it’s ever too late to start doing what you want, Waves.” Nicole thinks, for a moment, about watching long strands of her own hair fall in lines to the tile floor from the edge of borrowed scissors. Sweeping all that red into the garbage like loose fiberglass. “You just have to decide you deserve it.”

 

Waverly hums.

“Maybe.”

 

 

And then she’s shifting uncomfortably, but more around their hands, like that one point of pressure is some kind of axis.

“It’s a little cold out, huh?”

 

“Yup.” Nicole glances up fruitlessly to the clear sky.

 

It’s really not.

 

Nicole knows that Waverly wants something, but she’s a little distracted thinking of how Waverly’s dark eyes dropped to her mouth on that _maybe._

 

Waverly sighs. “You drove here, right? With Wynonna?”

 

Oh. “Yes.” 

Waverly digs blunt nails into her hand expectantly. Exasperatedly, almost,

 

“I think I might have some blankets?”

 

“Haught, you’re a godsend,”— Waverly’s voice goes light and sweet again and she’s tugging upwards until they’re both standing. She looks less like she’s drowning and more like she’s wading in that big letterman. Making for shore, at least.

—

 

(As it turns out, she does have a blanket.)

Nina Simone is filtering through Nicole’s shitty dash speakers, thin and melancholy, while she watches Waverly.

 

Waverly, who’s sunk back in the passenger seat with the blanket loose and mostly forgotten over her shoulders, eyes wide with the glow of the radio.

Reflecting a little green at the edge of her irises. Otherworldly.

 

“You think this place is cursed?” She asks, suddenly, and Nicole blinks rapidly.

 

“Like, the car, or the woods, or— “

 

“Purgatory. All of it.” She gestures broadly, sleeves still unruly and slipping to her wrists, looking for all the world sodden and heavy.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Like, why does no one ever seem to leave?”

Nicole takes it as rhetorical. It is.

 

“It feels like school just feeds right into the cemetery, you know? Like I’ll just keep working at Shorty’s now I’ve graduated, and Champ’ll do whatever the fuck people who peak when they get onto varsity do, and Wynonna will be the only one who leaves. Probably because she’ll die out in the woods somewhere, and we’ll never know why, and then it’ll just be me in that house. And you’ll just take over for Nedley someday, right?”

 

Nicole startles. “Uh— “

 

 

“Oh! I’m sorry,” and Waverly’s hands flutter between them and come to rest over the one Nicole has white-knuckling on the gear shift.

“You’d be a great sheriff, I just meant—“

She shifts her gaze to the copse just beyond the windshield, the sweeping darkness under that summer-sleepy canopy.

 

“Sometimes it just makes too much sense for this place to be called Purgatory.”

 

 

“Hey,” Nicole hushes, and tries for warmth. She turns her hand upward to lace with Waverly’s fingers.

“You’re the smartest person I know, Waves. If anyone can get out of here, it’ll be you.”

 

“You’ll find a way.”

Waverly’s watching her again with those dark, open eyes. “You always do.”

 

 

Still, Nicole thinks, with her heart starting a slow sink to the bottom of her ribs, that Purgatory really would live up to its name if Waverly Earp was gone.

And then, all at once, she stops thinking, because Waverly Earp is leaning over the gear shift with her shoulders pressing forward and one hand reaching to cradle her head, and pressing her mouth to Nicole’s.

 

 

More than anything, Waverly tastes like smoke. How long she’d been sitting and breathing in the fire, Nicole can’t imagine.

And more than anything, Waverly pulls back with a sated hum.

Her lipstick is smudged just so, and she closes her eyes for a long moment, reminding Nicole of Calamity Jane when she’s sprawled on her comforter. Her fingers curl in the hair at the base of Nicole’s skull.

 

“Take me somewhere, Haught,” she whispers, with her words like burnt honey, and Nicole does.

—

 

 

When Nicole pushes at the shoulders of Waverly’s jacket she sighs and sinks like Nicole’s divesting her of something much heavier, like she’s shedding some last few and stubborn scales.

She squeaks when Nicole presses her, bodily and hot, along the length of the backseat, and she works one hand between them to splay across Nicole’s stomach, nails tickling and then digging in just so to feel her ragged breathing.

 

God, Waverly and her hands are going to be the death of her. Even like this she can’t help feeling like she shouldn’t be allowed this, thoughts like these about a girl so soft, but then Waverly’s pressing her fingers up to Nicole’s parted lips and Waverly _moans_ when Nicole draws them into her mouth.

 

 

And that has Nicole stumbling back a little, rolling back onto her knees so Waverly can sit up.

 

 

“Hey,” she says, pressing at Nicole’s hipbone, still beatific. “You okay?”

 

Nicole holds onto her wrist like she’ll snap Waverly if she moves too fast. That was supposed to be her line.

“Is this, uh— I mean, are _you_ okay?”

 

Waverly thumbs at the corner of Nicole’s mouth, siphoning some of her lipstick back off.

 

“I’m _great_ ,” she breathes— and that’s not quite enough for Nicole, so she leans forward and up, to glance warm breath off her jaw.

 

“I’m doing what I want,” she says, slow andpressing her thumb into that soft space next to Nicole’s hip. “ _Who_ I want.”

 

She moves to press her forehead comfortably against Nicole’s, and her voice finally, finally shakes. “Because I deserve it, right?”

 

And that feeling, that tight sense of trespassing, turns over warm and gold in Nicole’s chest. “Oh my _God_ , of course.”

Waverly kisses her, just a long, aching press of mouths, slow tongues, and Nicole wonders how long she’s been waiting to hear it.

—

 

Nicole realizes early that Waverly likes to watch, swallow up every last little rise she gets with those big eyes.

Which, _God,_ is fine. There are a great deal of things Nicole wants to show her.

She wants Waverly to see her drawing long, wet lines down her stomach, rucking up her blouse with both hands. She wants Waverly to see her drop, quiet, to her knees and nudge one of Waverly’s legs over her shoulder, and she wants to watch her eyes close when she breathes out, slow and cool and meted at the crux of her thighs.

 

 

Waverly _chokes_ up against her in the dark. Like a live wire, and breathing hard— she digs her heel into Nicole’s back and it hurts in just about the best way.

Smiles blearily into Nicole’s mouth when she rises up to kiss her, all slow, light hands.

And let it never be said that Waverly Earp leaves favors unreturned.

 

 

Purgatory waits for them with its sleepy, smoky disquiet, as always, but it has the decency to wait until morning.

(And, well, Nicole is right about the letterman.)

**Author's Note:**

> i’m @seafleece on tumblr and @quetzalcoatlmundi for writing— come say hi!


End file.
